Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do

Preface

We never expected to write a book on violent video games and teenagers. It began as an academic research project at the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, a division of the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). We quickly discovered two things: everyone had strong opinions, and very few people had strong data on which to base those opinions. That was true for us as well.

So, with the help of funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, we put together a multidisciplinary, multigenerational research team and set about gathering data in a way that had been rarely done in the past by video game researchers: we actually talked to children and their parents. When we’d mention our research to others, they’d immediately start asking questions. Were video games as bad as they say? Were they benign entertainment? Did they help children become smarter or more physically coordinated? Were they the root cause of obesity? We didn’t know, but we were looking for clues.

The results of our research have been published in a series of papers in academic journals. Many of those papers contain detailed statistical analyses that would be inappropriate for a book like this, although we offer some of the basics in chapter 4. If you’d like to learn more about the research results, we encourage you to look at those articles.

We also want to emphasize that our research should be viewed as a step toward understanding and gaining perspective, not as an ultimate conclusion. One of the simultaneous joys and frustrations of conducting research in areas like this is that you end up with more questions than you had when you started.

For example, our focus groups on violent video games were limited to teenage boys and their parents. We assumed that girls were much less likely to play violent games than boys. Yet our surveys of more than 1,200 middle school students found that the M-rated Grand Theft Auto series was extremely popular among girls. We also found some preliminary evidence that girls play those games differently than boys do. Researchers will need to look into that to find out what’s going on.

We expect our findings and our analyses to be controversial. They don’t fall neatly into either side of the highly polarized discussions of the effects of video games on children. We expect our statements to be criticized and cherry-picked to support conflicting and impassioned claims.

Our hope, however, is that what we say will be taken as a whole and with its limitations kept in mind. We did not set out to prove anything about video games. We have no vested interests for or against them. We wanted to look at them and the children who play them from a different point of view, and then analyze what we discovered. So it should come as no surprise that our findings cannot be reduced to simple statements, pro or con.

In the course of our research, we ran across a lot of muddle-headed thinking, misuse of scientific data, and political posturing on the part of people from all points of view. We strove to shine a light on these without regard to individual agendas or politics.

While our names appear on the cover, we owe a tremendous amount to our research team and to others who provided guidance and support. Primus inter pares is our codirector at the center, Eugene V. Beresin, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and MGH, and director of the combined child and adolescent psychiatry residency training program at MGH and McLean Hospital. His insights, support and hard work have been invaluable, as has his friendship.

Armand Nicholi, Jr., MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and MGH, was instrumental in getting this project under way and continued as an adviser throughout the process.

Our research team included Jason Almerigi, PhD; Lee Baer, PhD; Molly Butterworth; Danielle DeLuca; Catherine Garth; Sarah Hertzog; Lionel Howard, PhD; Michael Kutner; Spencer Lynn, PhD; George Nitzburg; and Dorothy E. Warner, PhD. What an amazing group!

Jerrold F. Rosenbaum, MD, chairman of the department of psychiatry at MGH, provided intellectual and political support for our work, as did Michael Jellinek, MD, and Chester Pierce, MD. Richard M. Lerner, PhD, at Tufts University provided guidance, perspective and encouragement.

Congressman Frank Wolf, a long-standing advocate for children’s well-being, helped connect us to the Department of Justice and made the research possible.

Many researchers from other institutions freely gave of their time to help. So did people from the video game industry and children’s advocates. Our literary agent, Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic, and our editor, Sydny Miner at Simon & Schuster, helped make this book a reality.

We’ve interspersed comments from some of these people throughout the book. When there is no footnote attached to a comment, it came from a conversation with us rather than a published paper or Web site. The people quoted have confirmed that these comments are accurate. Finally, we would like to thank the nearly two thousand children and parents who let us know what they did and why they did it, and who shared their unvarnished opinions.

CHAPTER 1

The Big Fear

We’ve been seeing a whole rash of shootings throughout this country and in Europe that relate back to kids who obsessively play violent video games. The kids involved as shooters in Columbine were obsessively playing violent video games. We know after the Beltway sniper incident where the seventeen-year-old was a fairly good shot, but Mr. Muhammad, the police tell us, got him to practice on an ultraviolent video game in sniper mode to break down his hesitancy to kill.

—Washington State representative Mary Lou Dickerson on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), July 7, 2003 ¹

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD DARREN AND A HALF DOZEN OF HIS video game–playing friends are sitting around a table at the Boys and Girls Club in a working-class section of Boston. We’re talking about the games, especially the violent ones. They’ve all played them.

Darren had a tough time in school earlier this week. On Monday, a teacher said something that embarrassed him in front of his classmates. When he went home that afternoon, he plugged in his video game console, loaded Grand Theft Auto 3, blew up a few cars and shot a half-dozen people, including a young blonde woman. When asked, Darren admits that the woman he killed in the game looked a lot like his teacher.

If you listen to the politicians and the pundits, the relationship is blindingly clear: playing violent video games leads children to engage in real-world violence or, at the very least, to become more aggressive.

In August 2005, the American Psychological Association issued a resolution on violence in video games and interactive media, stating that perpetrators go unpunished in 73 percent of all violent scenes, and therefore teach that violence is an effective means of resolving conflict.²

The attorney for Lee Malvo, the young DC Sniper, claimed that the teen had taught himself to kill by playing Halo on his Xbox game console. He’s trained and desensitized with video games…to shoot human forms over and over.³

Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid computer gamers. According to psychologists Craig Anderson and Karen Dill, "One possible contributing factor is violent video games. Harris and Klebold enjoyed playing the bloody shoot-’em-up video game Doom, a game licensed by the U.S. Army to train soldiers to effectively kill."⁴

We hear that youth violence, as reflected in violent crime and school shootings, is a growing problem, and that young game players are socially isolated and unable to form interpersonal relationships.

The growth in violent video game sales is linked to the growth in youth violence—especially school violence—throughout the country.

School shooters fit a profile that includes a fascination with violent media, especially violent video games.

A British study by Save the Children was described in the press as finding that children are struggling to make friends at school because they spend too long playing computer games.⁵ A spokesperson for that organization added, Children have always played alone, for example with dolls or train sets, but these activities required a certain level of imagination—they stimulated their brains. That is not the case with modern computer games, which do children’s thinking for them and put them in their own little world.⁶

We’re told that the game ratings and content descriptors provided by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) are all that’s needed to help parents protect their children from violent and other inappropriate content.

The ESRB employs child development specialists who play each game thoroughly before assigning it a rating that helps parents select which games are most appropriate for their children.

Video games that are rated T (may be suitable for ages 13 and older) are less likely to desensitize a child to real-world violence than video games that are rated M (may be suitable for ages 17 and older).

Checking the ratings on the games our children bring home—and not allowing M-rated games—is the best way to protect our children from video game violence.

All of these statements are wrong! Some are misunderstandings; others are outright lies. In fact, much of the information in the popular press about the effects of violent video games is wrong.

Torturing the Data?

Guy Cumberbatch, PhD, is a psychologist specializing in media research. He directs the Communications Research Group in Great Britain and has been studying the effects of mass media on violent behavior for several decades. He sums up that research succinctly:

The real puzzle is that anyone looking at the research evidence in this field could draw any conclusions about the pattern, let alone argue with such confidence and even passion that it demonstrates the harm of violence on television, in film and in video games. While tests of statistical significance are a vital tool of the social sciences, they seem to have been more often used in this field as instruments of torture on the data until it confesses something which could justify publication in a scientific journal.

If one conclusion is possible, it is that the jury is not still out. It’s never been in. Media violence has been subjected to lynch mob mentality with almost any evidence used to prove guilt.⁷

The strong link between video game violence and real world violence, and the conclusion that video games lead to social isolation and poor interpersonal skills, are drawn from bad or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded, simplistic news reports:

The allegation that perpetrators go unpunished in 73 percent of all violent scenes is based on research from the mid-1990s that looked at selected television programs, not video games.⁸

The video game Halo involves shooting an unrealistic gun at a giant alien bug. It is not an effective way to train as a real sniper. In court, Lee Malvo admitted that he trained by shooting a real gun at paper plates that represented human heads. Also, Malvo had a long history of antisocial and criminal behavior, including torturing small animals—one of the best predictors of future violent criminal behavior.⁹

It’s unlikely that Harris and Klebold’s interest in violent video games or other violent media played any significant role in their actions. An FBI investigation concluded that Klebold was significantly depressed and suicidal, and Harris was a sociopath.¹⁰

Youth violence has decreased significantly over the past decade.¹¹ You are more likely to be struck and killed by lightning than to die in a school shooting.¹²

Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since. School violence has also gone down. Between 1994 and 2001, arrests for murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assaults fell 44 percent, resulting in the lowest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes since 1983. Murder arrests, which reached a high of 3,800 in 1993, plummeted to 1,400 by 2001.¹³

The U.S. Secret Service intensely studied each of the thirty-seven non-gang and non-drug-related school shootings and stabbings that were considered targeted attacks* that took place nationally from 1974 through 2000. (Note how few premeditated school shootings there actually were during that twenty-seven-year time period, compared with the public perception of those shootings as relatively common events!) The incidents studied included the most notorious school shootings (e.g., Columbine, Santee, Paducah), in which the young perpetrators had been linked in the press to violent video games. The Secret Service found that there was no accurate profile. Only one in eight school shooters showed any interest in violent video games; only one in four liked violent movies.¹⁴

On the other hand, reports of bullying are up.¹⁵ While bullying may not make the headlines, it makes a big difference in the everyday lives of our children.¹⁶ As you’ll see in chapter 4, our research found that certain patterns of video game play were much more likely to be associated with these types of behavioral problems than with major violent crime such as school shootings.

For many children and adolescents, playing video games is an intensely social activity, not an isolating one.

Many games involve multiperson play, with the players either in the same room or connected electronically. They often require that players communicate so that they can coordinate their efforts. Our research found that playing violent video games was associated with playing with friends.

For younger children especially, games are a topic of conversation that allows them to build relationships with peers.

Although it came from a reputable organization, the widely cited British study claiming that increased use of electronic media has led to social isolation among children based its findings on the personal opinions of an unspecified group of primary school teachers who were asked to compare today’s children (ages five to eleven) to what they remembered about children who were in their classrooms when they started teaching, not on scientific observations of children conducted over time. Blaming supposed deterioration of social skills among kindergartners and first graders on MP3 players and time spent surfing the Internet is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. Also, the study was part of a publicity campaign for Friendship Friday, an annual fund-raising event in Great Britain for Save the Children.¹⁷

The current ESRB rating system, while more effective and informative than other media rating systems, has significant flaws that need to be addressed.

ESRB raters don’t actually play the games at all. They watch videos of excerpts of the games that have been provided by the manufacturers.* Until 2007, the Entertainment Software Rating Board employed temporary workers with no background in child development to rate its games. Their previous online help-wanted ad for game raters stated:

The ESRB is looking for adults with flexible hours that would be available to come to our office in midtown Manhattan on a freelance basis (1-4 times a month) during normal (9-5) business hours to rate video games. Experience with children is preferred. Prior experience playing games is not required and training will be provided.¹⁸

That approach has recently been revised. The ESRB now uses full-time employees to rate games, although training in child development (or even being a parent) is still not required. The new (2007) online help-wanted ad for game raters reads:

Prospective candidates should have:

Experience with children

Interest in and familiarity with video games

Strong communications skills (verbal, written)

Parents and those with video game playing abilities are preferred, though these are not requirements. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. Training will be provided.

According to research on the effects of violent media, the ESRB may have parts of its ratings system backward! One of the predictors of which violent media are likely to result in violent real-world behavior is material that does not show the realistic negative consequences of violence, such as pain, suffering and blood.¹⁹ Violent video games that are rated M are more likely to show those negative consequences. Those that are rated T or E achieve such lower ratings in part by not showing those negative consequences: dead bodies just disappear; blood is animated rather than realistic.²⁰ Also, those games in which the player is rewarded with extra points for avoiding a violent confrontation (e.g., the SWAT series) are given the same M rating as those games in which the player is given extra points for piling up virtual corpses.

Our interviews with adolescents and their parents found that while parents thought they knew which games their children were playing, for the most part they did not. Also, a growing number of games—some of them extremely violent, sexist and racist—are available for play online and are not rated by the ESRB. Neither of these is the ESRB’s fault, of course, but they point out some of the limits of any game rating system.

As Darren tells his story about feeling angry, then playing the violent video game in which he blew up cars and shot several people, including one who looked a lot like his teacher, the other kids sitting around the table nod their heads. It’s clear that at one time or another, they have each done something similar. I guess I got my anger out, Darren says. Then I sat down and did my homework.

The Game Made Him a Zombie

The United States is by no means alone in its common assumption that video game violence leads to real-world violence. On January 11, 2006, an allegedly drunk twenty-year-old man entered a synagogue in Moscow, brandished a knife, and injured eight people, six of whom required hospitalization. The Russian newspaper Pravda reported the story:

Alexander Koptsev was a quiet and unsociable young man. He had no criminal record and was leading a decent lifestyle. Alexander suffered a severe psychological trauma a year ago, when his sister died, the Kommersant newspaper wrote. Being unable to handle his grief, the man became a secluded individual, started spending most of his time indoors and developed an addiction to computer games.

Alexander Koptsev was playing a game called Postal-2 before he left home and went to the synagogue in Moscow center. The game models a situation, in which the character is supposed to kill as many people as possible in the streets of the city….

The game which the young man was playing made him a zombie. The man was programmed to demolish and kill. It was believed not so long ago that the descriptions of such mental disorders could be found in fictitious novels and stories. However, those addicted to computer games often suffer from the so-called video game epilepsy syndrome. Ardent gamers suffer from headaches, facial muscular spasms and eyesight disorder. The syndrome does not lead to aggravation of mental abilities of a human being. However, it develops certain peculiarities typical of epilepsy: a person may become highly suspicious, aggressive and hostile about everything and everyone. A person who suffers from the video game epilepsy syndrome can easily grab a kitchen knife, leave the virtual world and look for victims in reality.

The incident in the Moscow synagogue is an alarming signal indeed. However, this signal warns about the growing influence of virtual reality on the human mind.²¹

This is utter nonsense, of course. In his confession to the Moscow police, Koptsev said absolutely nothing about video games; he stated that he was envious of the Jews’ standard of living and spoke of his desire to die.²² Clearly, this was a very troubled young man.

While there have been some reports in medical journals of an increase in the number of seizures among children over the past century, especially among children watching television or playing video games who are already diagnosed with epilepsy,²³ these are extremely rare events when compared with the number of children and the amount of time spent playing video games. In some of those children, flickering lights (such as those on a television or computer monitor) can trigger seizures. These seizures are not associated with the types of dramatic paranoid or violent behaviors described in the Pravda article.

Our Journey as Parents

The prolific scientist and author Isaac Asimov famously stated, The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny…’ So it shouldn’t be surprising that our first step into what would become several years of full-time research was our casual observations of our son, who liked to play video games.

One of us (Cheryl) is a public health researcher specializing in media influences on health-related behaviors. The other (Larry) is a clinical psychologist and journalist specializing in child development and parent-child communication. We’re old enough to have been teenagers at a time when the few video games available had titles like Pong and Space Invaders. But we’re young enough to feel very comfortable working and playing with computers and other technology.

Neither of us were gamers a few years ago; one of us is today. (The other can take it or leave it—a sure sign of a generation gap.) Our teenage son, Michael, had first played simple computer games in childcare when he was about three years old. Those games had crude graphics and agonizingly repetitive (to an adult) music. They involved completing simple tasks, such as lining up an animated fire truck with a mark on the screen so that the cartoon firefighters could rescue a cat in distress.

He played the games a few times and loved them. Like other children that age, he was completely fearless when it came to interacting with computers. While his teachers hesitated over the new and complicated devices, he and his classmates saw computers as friendly toys and plunged ahead.

This is a pattern seen in the introduction of all new technologies. Our own parents were initially uncomfortable around microwave ovens, color televisions and electric typewriters. Our grandparents were unsure about commercial aviation. Although they would surely deny it now, our children will one day balk at some of the future technologies that their own children will readily embrace.

Since we had personal computers in our offices at home, we decided to look into video games when Michael was about five years old. A few stood out as developmentally appropriate and nonviolent, including a series that featured an animated purple car named Putt-Putt.

In one particularly endearing game, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, the child, acting as Putt-Putt, is asked to solve a series of simple one-step and two-step problems in the rich environment of an animated zoo. With each successful solution, one of the six lost baby animals at the zoo would be reunited with its parents. The child could also take time out to play ice hockey with polar bears, dance with penguins and interact with magical flowers. It was utterly charming, nonviolent and both emotionally and cognitively spot-on for a preschooler.

The graphics in these games were much more complex and sophisticated than those of earlier generations of computer games. In fact, when our son played them, the video was a bit choppy and the audio was occasionally out of sync. The computer he used simply couldn’t do all the mathematical calculations quickly enough to run the game smoothly. Interestingly, this was the same computer that Cheryl had recently used to do all of the statistical calculations for her doctoral dissertation in public health at Harvard. Her computer was good enough for graduate school, but not powerful enough for our five-year-old’s games of Putt-Putt. This was a harbinger of things to come in the world